Why Bletchley Park is at war again - Telegraph World War Two Why Bletchley Park is at war again Conflict between the bodies responsible for the protection of the former Second World War code-breaking HQ has broken out into the open The Bletchley Park code-breakers’ penetration of the innermost workings of the Nazi high command is believed by some historians to have shortened the war by two years. Photo: John Lawrence Comments Extreme secrecy ensured that those working at Bletchley Park during the Second World War had little to fear from the Germans. The Luftwaffe crew who jettisoned their bombs over the code-breaking centre while returning from a raid during the night of November 20 1940 were oblivious of the priceless target they had so narrowly missed. That was the only time Bletchley was seriously threatened by enemy action. When destruction eventually loomed, it came from a far more dangerous quarter: the housing developers of south-east England. In 1991, the Buckinghamshire estate, largely abandoned by its post-war users – Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and British Telecom – seemed destined for a new and altogether less noble career as a site for executive homes.

The huts in which the intricacies of the Enigma cypher machine had been mastered were to be torn down and consigned to the history books. One of the most crucial battlefields of 1939-45, albeit an intellectual one, was to be erased. The developers were fought off in 1992 when Bletchley was declared a conservation area and the Bletchley Park Trust formed to protect the historic site. But Bletchley remained a sorry spectacle for more than a decade, the huts – flimsy, wartime ''temporary’’ structures – remaining in danger of collapse. Starved of money, the trust was holding a crisis meeting every fortnight. Today, all that has changed. In June, a rejuvenated Bletchley is due to open to the public; £8 million of investment, including a £5 million donation from the Heritage Lottery Fund, is being used to create a new visitor centre and restore the huts that produced the Ultra decrypts, the crown jewels of wartime intelligence.

The opening is intended to coincide with the 70th anniversary of D-Day, June 6 1944, the success of which was owed in no small part to Bletchley. The code-breakers’ penetration of the innermost workings of the Nazi high command is believed by some historians to have shortened the war by two years. Related Articles Silly blighters 27 Feb 2014 Yet, even as its renaissance beckons, Bletchley still labours under a cloud. A long-running dispute between the trust and its tenants threatens to delay the refurbishment and dampen the relaunch. There is a considerable amount of bad blood at Bletchley, with sources in the trust accusing the opposition of trying to sabotage its bid for Lottery money and obstruct the revamp. The trust, which includes on its board Sir John Scarlett, former chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, is in turn being criticised for trying to turn the estate into a “war memorial”, marginalising the scientific innovation that takes place within its boundaries. The House of Lords is holding a debate on Bletchley today, intended as a pleasant amble down memory lane for members involved in its work or history.

Noble lords will no doubt be dismayed to learn of the battle of attrition waged there over the past few years. There are two tenants on the estate, Bletchley Park Capital Partners (BPCP), which leases the famous mansion and other buildings, and The National Museum of Computing, home to, among other exhibits, a working replica of Colossus, the world’s first electronic computer, built to speed up the human code-breaking operation at Bletchley. BPCP earns its money from sub-letting units to small businesses, many of them hi-tech. The computer museum, a charity, relies on donations and receipts from visitors, many of whom are drawn to the site by the neighbouring code-breaking museum. Sources within the trust say one man more than any other has been behind attempts to block its vision for Bletchley. Tim Reynolds is the founder of Bletchley Park Capital Partners, which in 2005 took out a lease on the mock-Tudor, mock-Gothic concoction that is the mansion. He is also a co-founder of Ceravision, a company specialising in energy-efficient industrial lighting, which is based at Bletchley.

Mr Reynolds values Ceravision at more than £100 million. The computing museum was created in 2007 and pays the trust about £120,000 a year in rent, service charges and utility bills. It has struggled since its creation and has been bailed out by Mr Reynolds and his partners to the tune of £100,000. A year after the donation, Mr Reynolds was appointed the computing museum’s chairman. He therefore wears two hats on the Bletchley site, business and charitable. The trust’s relationship with BPCP has been an unhappy one. Between 2008 and 2009, BPCP was in dispute with the trust over its rent, claiming that it should not have to pay separately for utilities. The trust took the matter to court but then agreed to arbitration, resulting in the writing-off of BPCP’s debts. Peace was short-lived. In late 2009, the trust was engaged in an application to the Heritage Lottery Fund for a £5 million grant to refurbish Bletchley. Sources in the trust say a number of calls were made to the fund in which it was advised to turn down the application.

Mr Reynolds admits: “We did actually write to them (the fund) to put them on notice that there were a number of significant issues that should not be ignored in granting the Lottery application. I didn’t personally phone them but one of my team did phone them to say, 'There are significant issues’.” Despite the intervention, the Lottery grant was awarded in 2011. But more was to come. The revamp of Bletchley Park includes a new fence, which the trust says is vital to protect the expensive interactive exhibits showing how code-breaking worked. Last July, Mr Reynolds threatened to take out an injunction suspending construction of the fence. He claimed that BPCP’s tenants would be inconvenienced by more restricted access to the estate. To avoid delay, the trust again agreed to arbitration, accepting a reduction in BPCP’s rent for 18 months and other concessions totalling £150,000, in exchange for the company dropping its opposition to the fence. But having agreed to the construction of the fence in his business capacity, Mr Reynolds, as chairman of the computer museum, has continued to take a leading role in the campaign against it.

Wearing his museum hat, he describes the fence as a “Berlin Wall” separating the code-breaking museum from the computing museum. Both sides claim to be in the right over joint-ticketing, which would allow visitors to the code-breaking museum access to the computer museum for a small additional fee. The trust says it has bent over backwards to cut the struggling computer museum a good deal, offering to give it a portion of every ticket sold by the code-breaking museum, even if visitors do not visit the computer museum. The code-breaking museum would increase ticket prices to ensure the computer museum gets its cut. The computer museum, with Mr Reynolds at its head, is asking the trust to write off £250,000 of debt in return for a joint ticketing deal. The trust has refused, offering a reduction of just £150,000. Sources in the trust says that if Mr Reynolds and the computer museum had accepted the original offer of a portion of all ticket sales, the computer museum would already have made £285,000, more than the debt reduction it demands.

Bletchley trustees are said to be losing patience with Mr Reynolds and what they see as his apparent strategy of obstructing progress on the site while extracting financial concessions for his business and charitable interests. Trustees contacted by The Telegraph declined to comment on Mr Reynolds’s behaviour, saying they were reluctant to inflame the situation. But Sir Dermot Turing, a Bletchley trustee and nephew of the code-breaking genius Alan Turing, said he was bemused by the decision to turn down the “very generous” joint-ticketing offer. “It’s disappointing that it was rejected,” he says. “The apparent friction between the Bletchley Park Trust and The National Museum of Computing is bewildering. It is in everybody’s interests for these two important museums, which share a site and a common heritage, to work together.” Mr Reynolds blames some members of the trust for the endless, draining Battle of Bletchley. “We think the basic structure of Bletchley Park is broken,” he says. “We would like a review into how we got into this ridiculous situation, where we this have fragmentation of the site.” BPCP’s lease on Bletchley runs out in six years but that doesn’t mean Mr Reynolds is going away.

According to him, the lease must be extended automatically for another 15 years unless terminated by mutual consent. “I think they [the trust] don’t want us there,” he says. “They are driven by a vision of turning Bletchley Park into a war memorial. The relevance of the computer museum, Colossus and what followed in the field of computing, doesn’t seem to interest them.” An Amazing Day Out - Review of Bletchley Park, Milton Keynes, England - TripAdvisor Review of Bletchley Park Bletchley Park Sherwood Drive | Bletchley, Milton Keynes MK3 6EB, England +44 1908 640404 Attraction details Recommended length of visit: 2-3 hours Owner description: Bletchley Park, Home of the WW2 Codebreakers, was once Britain's best kept secret and is now a vibrant heritage attraction open daily to visitors to learn how the Codebreakers' breath-taking achievements helped shorten WW2 by up to two years.

Useful Information: Wheelchair access, Food available for purchase, Bathroom facilities There are newer reviews for this attraction “An Amazing Day Out” Reviewed April 13, 2016 Situated at Bletchley, near Milton Keynes. Accessible by train or road. About 1hr. - 1hr.20 from N.W. London on the M1. Parking limited on site but available in the surrounding estate. Fascinating and very interesting tour of the basic buildings and huts where the World War 2 was shortened by 2 years by the cracking of the Enigma codes. Audio headphones are provided free of charge, which give a better insight to what went on with the absolute basic materials that were available at the time. If you fail to spend enough time to visit and take everything in, a return trip, within 12 months, is gratis.... keep you entry receipt/ticket Food is available, reasonably priced on site Many interactive games and challenges for children and adults are there for participation Defi2itely 5orth a vi7it (crack the code) Cannesdid ...

surfingsyd Ask Syd M about Bletchley Park This review is the subjective opinion of a TripAdvisor member and not of TripAdvisor LLC. 4,495 reviews from our community Visitor rating Reviewed April 13, 2016 via mobile This is a fantastic day out and very informative about a part of our history that many of us can resonate to. I would go back and also recommend to friends and family. Very well laid out and also focuses on the key points essentially of being the precursor for GCHQ. Thoroughly enjoyed the day. Visited April 2016 Ask Cambridgefan1 about Bletchley Park This review is the subjective opinion of a TripAdvisor member and not of TripAdvisor LLC. neddyb1 “Well worth our 7 hour round trip!” Reviewed April 12, 2016 This is the most expensive museum I've been to and this, coupled with the 3 and a half hour journey down and the total lack of directions from the M1 made me very ready to not like this place.

Having said that, we arrived at 10 in the morning and were thrown out at 5 and I've got to say that this is the best museum I've been to for a very long time. I could just give a long list of everything that's great about it but really you need to just swallow the cost and go! My advice, for what it's worth;- 1. take a picnic - plenty of tables for them. 2. if you are travelling a distance - we came down from Chester - leave very early so you can spend the whole day - we were there 7 hours but didn't see it all. 3. see the World War one exhibition first as it explains a lot of the background you'll need before the Second World war stuff. (its on the right in the first building as you go in) 4. Take your time during the introduction bit that follows the process from receiving Wireless intercepts through deciphering and translation. Having a grip on this is very important as all the different huts are involved in different bits of this process and it really helps to have an overview of the whole process to work out where it all fits in. 5.

try and see the talk about the Bombe machine - the one in the Alan Turing film - at least a couple of times (they run continuously) to get your head round it!!! 6. don't take young kids - we left the 8 year old at home; she would have hated it and we'd have had a day spent trying to manage her boredom and it was a long way and a big investment to have it ruined by tantrums!! The 12 year old loved it. It was just a great place and there seems to be many more bits to be rescued and opened up yet. Hopefully they'll get done before the surrounding houses encroach too much. The only downsides - it really does need signposting from the motorway - it's surely a big enough attraction now for people from all over the country to warrant it's own brown signs and it was sad to see the National Museum of Computing more or less on the same site but separate - it felt like the two museums had had a falling out - and as they had the Colossus model it would have been nice to see that as well. Could it be the same museum???? Not sure but we wouldn't have had time for them both anyway.

But they're just quibbles - can't praise it highly enough!! Reviewed April 11, 2016 via mobile There are literally hundreds of 5* star reviews about Bletchley Park (BP) from trip advisor colleagues. No need to repeat them; they are richly deserved. Sir Winston Churchill and General Eisenhower wrote a couple too, 70 years ago, about the real thing! And here is the rub...in visiting BP now, as a marvellous, historic heritage site, we are experiencing the campus more or less as it was during World War 2. It has been the subject of books, films and television programmes; all the more interesting for that. In 2009, Prime Minister Gordon Brown wrote another review (on our behalf) saying thank you BP (for its heroic achievements in code and cypher breaking etc) and sorry Alan Turing (the lead academic code breaker) for the "appalling way he was treated" as a gay person (in the 1950s after the war). In walking round the BP campus, it's impossible not to wonder about that and how its achievements and capabilities remained such a tightly kept secret, and for so long.

I guess we're all pretty glad that it it did! Visited April 2016 Reviewed April 11, 2016 via mobile My partner and I visited Bletchley on a Saturday. It was quiet to begin with and we headed straight to Huts 3 and 6 whilst no one was there. As soon as it got busier however it was unpleasant. There were lots of people all trying to navigate there way around with the audio guides but they just kept getting in the way. We chose to use our eyes and navigate with a map instead. We ended up skipping some aspects due to the number if people inside. The ticket price of nearly £18.00 each is quite frankly extortionate. Fortunately we arrived by train and used the 2 for 1 entry option but I wouldn't return. Such a disappointment. Things to do in Bletchley | Days Out | Places to Visit You are here: Towns -> Places to Visit in Buckinghamshire -> Bletchley Things to do in Bletchley, Buckinghamshire Bletchley in Buckinghamshire is five miles south of Milton Keynes , close to the A5 and the M1 motorway.

This historic community has its own distinct character with a history dating back to the 12th century . The Anglo-Saxon name means "Blaecca's Clearing". The town was recorded in 12th century manor records as Bicchelai, which over time became Bletchley. Bletchley remained a hamlet for centuries on the road between Fenny Stratford and Buckingham . In 1845, when the London and North Western Railway was built, Bletchley became a major railway junction and the town expanded rapidly. It was also on Watling Street, an old Roman Road which is now the A5. The Grand Union Canal passes just south of the town. All these strong transport links gave the area its industrial history. Bletchley Park was an important secret base for code breakers during World War II . It is famous as the place where the German Enigma Code was broken and where the world's first basic computer, Colossus, was developed. In the 1960s Bletchley was part of the designated area of the New Town plan for developing Milton Keynes as an overspill for London .

The population grew from 5,500 to 17,000 residents by 1961. Present Day Bletchley Bletchley is now a sizeable town of around 34,000 inhabitants. It has a traditional High Street of independent local shops and traditional services. Queen Elizabeth II visited Bletchley in 1966 and the shopping area was named Queensway in her honour. Most larger retail stores can be found in the neighbouring Milton Keynes Shopping Centre. Bletchley has excellent links for commuters. Its railway station is served by frequent trains to London Euston, just 35 minutes away, as well as to Birmingham New Street and Manchester Piccadilly. Luton airport is also convenient, a 35 minute drive away. The town is the home of Milton Keynes Dons Football Club stadium which has a capacity of 30,000. Things to Do Around Bletchley Bletchley Park is now a museum celebrating the important work done in decrypting ciphers and codes. It significantly shortened World War II and consequently saved many lives. The National Museum of Computing is also part of the same site.

Bletchley has many unspoilt nature reserves and natural areas such as the Blue Lagoon Nature Reserve and the West Bletchley Sensory Garden. The canal is used for recreational boating, kayaking and fishing. There are pleasant traffic-free walks along the tow path and local pubs for refreshments. The town hosts many successful events which are fun to join in. West Bletchley Carnival in June attracts 20,000 visitors. The Midsummer Madness and the Fenny Poppers celebration, when six cannons are fired, are all popular attractions. Historic Woburn Abbey is open to the public although it is still the magnificent home of the 15th Duke of Bedford. It dates back to 1145 and is set in a 3,000 acre deer park landscaped by Sir Humphrey Repton . All the family will enjoy visiting Woburn Safari Park , where you can drive through the park to meet a wide variety of animals. The abbey is also the home to a large Antiques Centre with over 50 shops, showcases and craft workshops.

Share this page Bletchley Park | Wiki | Everipedia × Want to change something on this page or create your own? Register today, it's fast and free. Bletchley Park 1938 (as a code-breaking centre); 1993 (as a museum) Location Bletchley Park was the central site for Britain's codebreakers during World War II . Run by the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), it regularly penetrated the secret communications of the Axis Powers – most importantly the German Enigma and Lorenz ciphers. The official historian of World War II British Intelligence has written that the " Ultra " intelligence produced at Bletchley shortened the war by two to four years, and that without it the outcome of the war would have been uncertain. Located in Milton Keynes , Buckinghamshire , England , Bletchley Park is now a flourishing heritage attraction. Open seven days a week, it is popular with individuals and families as well as school groups and tour parties. Site Bletchley Park is opposite Bletchley railway station . It is close to junctions 13 and 14 of the M1 .

Located 50 miles (80 km) northwest of London , the site appears in the Domesday Book as part of the Manor of Eaton . Browne Willis built a mansion there in 1711, but after Thomas Harrison purchased the property in 1793 this was pulled down. It was first known as Bletchley Park after its purchase by Samuel Lipscomb Seckham in 1877. The estate of 581 acres (235 ha) was bought in 1883 by Sir Herbert Samuel Leon , who expanded the then-existing farmhouse into the present "maudlin and monstrous pile" combining Victorian Gothic , Tudor , and Dutch Baroque styles. In 1938, the mansion and much of the site was bought by a builder planning a housing estate, but in May 1938 Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair , head of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6 ) bought the mansion and 58 acres (23 ha) for use by GC&CS and SIS in the event of war.

A key advantage seen by Sinclair and his colleagues (inspecting the site under the cover of "Captain Ridley's shooting party") was Bletchley's geographical centrality. It was almost immediately adjacent to Bletchley railway station , where the " Varsity Line " between Oxford and Cambridge – whose universities were expected to supply many of the code-breakers – met the main West Coast railway line connecting London, Birmingham , Manchester , Liverpool , Glasgow and Edinburgh . Watling Street , the main road linking London to the north-west (now the A5 ) was close by, and high-volume communication links were available at the telegraph and telephone repeater station in nearby Fenny Stratford . Bletchley Park was known as "B.P." to those who worked there. "Station X" (X = Roman numeral ten), "London Signals Intelligence Centre", and " Government Communications Headquarters " were all cover names used during the war. (The formal posting of the many "Wrens" – members of the Women's Royal Naval Service – working there was to HMS Pembroke V .) Personnel In January 1945, at the peak of codebreaking efforts, some 10,000 personnel were working at Bletchley.

[2] A substantial percentage of personnel at Bletchley Park, 75%, [2] were women, among them Mavis Batey , Margaret Rock who were credited for the Abwehr break . [3] Their work has found official recognition only in 2009. [4] Many of the women came from middle-class backgrounds [4] and widely hold degrees in the areas of mathematics, physics and engineering; they were given entry into STEM programs due to the lack of men who were sent to war. They performed complex calculation and coding and hence were integral to the computing processes [5] —Jennifer S. Light writes that they Women were indeed the first computers. Commander Alastair Denniston was operational head of GC&CS from 1919 to 1942, beginning with its formation from the Admiralty 's Room 40 (NID25) and the War Office 's MI1b . Key GC&CS cryptanalysts who moved from London to Bletchley Park included John Tiltman , Dillwyn "Dilly" Knox , Josh Cooper , and Nigel de Grey .

These people had a variety of backgrounds – linguists, chess champions, and crossword experts were common, and in Knox's case papyrology . The British War Office recruited top solvers of cryptic crossword puzzles, as these individuals had strong lateral thinking skills. [6] On the day Britain declared war on Germany, Denniston wrote to the Foreign Office about recruiting "men of the professor type". Personal networking drove early recruitments, particularly of men from the universities of Cambridge and Oxford. Trustworthy women were similarly recruited for administrative and clerical jobs. In one 1941 recruiting stratagem The Daily Telegraph was asked to organise a crossword competition, after which promising contestants were discreetly approached about "a particular type of work as a contribution to the war effort". [7] Denniston recognised, however, that the enemy's use of electromech­anical cipher machines meant that formally trained mathematicians would be needed as well; Oxford's Peter Twinn joined GC&CS in February 1939; Cambridge's Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman began training in 1938 and reported to Bletchley the day after war was declared, along with John Jeffreys .

Later-recruited cryptanalysts included the mathematicians Derek Taunt , Jack Good , Bill Tutte , and Max Newman ; historian Harry Hinsley , and chess champions Hugh Alexander and Stuart Milner-Barry . Joan Clarke (eventually deputy head of Hut 8 ) was one of the few women employed at Bletchley as a full-fledged cryptanalyst. [8] This eclectic staff of " Boffins and Debs " caused GC&CS to be whimsically dubbed the "Golf, Cheese and Chess Society", [9] with the female staff in Dilwyn Knox's section sometimes termed "Dilly's Fillies". These "Dilly's girls" included Margaret Rock , Jean Perrin, Clare Harding, Rachel Ronald, Elisabeth Granger; and Mavis Lever – who made the first break into the Italian naval traffic and later on solved a German code together with Margaret Rock.

During a September 1941 morale-boosting visit, Winston Churchill reportedly remarked to Denniston: "I told you to leave no stone unturned to get staff, but I had no idea you had taken me so literally." Six weeks later, having failed to get sufficient typing and unskilled staff to achieve the productivity that was possible, Turing, Welchman, Alexander and Milner-Barry wrote directly to Churchill. His response was "Action this day make sure they have all they want on extreme priority and report to me that this has been done." After initial training at the Inter-Service Special Intelligence School set up by John Tiltman (initially at an RAF depot in Buckingham and later in Bedford – where it was known locally as "the Spy School") staff worked a six-day week, rotating through three shifts: 4 p.m. to midnight, midnight to 8 a.m. (the most disliked shift), and 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., each with a half-hour meal break. At the end of the third week a worker went off at 8 a.m. and came back at 4 p.m., thus putting in sixteen hours on that last day.

The irregular hours affected workers' health and social life, as well as the routines of the nearby homes at which most staff lodged. The work was tedious and demanded intense concentration; staff got one week's leave four times a year, but some "girls" collapsed and required extended rest. A small number of men (e.g. Post Office experts in Morse code or German) worked part-time. In January 1945, at the peak of codebreaking efforts, some 9,000 personnel were working at Bletchley; over 12,000 different persons (some 80% of them women, primarily seconded from Britain's armed forces and Civil Service) were assigned there at various points throughout the war. Rozanne Colchester was a translator at Bletchley Park, she worked there from April 1942 until January 1945 mainly for the Italian air forces Section. [10] Like most of the 'Bletchleyettes', she came from the higher middle class, her father, Air Vice-Marshal Sir Charles Medhurst, being an air attaché in Rome.

Before joining the Workforce of the Park, Colchester was moving in high circles “ she had met Hitler and been flirted with by Mussolini at an embassy party” writes Sarah Rainey. She joined the Park because she found it thrilling to 'fight'/work for her country. Ruth Briggs (later called Mrs. Oliver Churchill) worked within the Naval Section and was known as one of the best cryptographers. She also was a German scholar. [11] Secrecy Properly used, the German Enigma and Lorenz ciphers should have been virtually unbreakable, but flaws in German cryptographic procedures, and poor discipline among the personnel carrying them out, created vulnerabilities which made Bletchley's attacks just barely feasible. These vulnerabilities, however, could have been remedied by relatively simple improvements in enemy procedures, and such changes would certainly have been implemented had Germany any hint of Bletchley's success. Thus the intelligence Bletchley produced was considered wartime Britain's " Ultra secret" – higher even than the normally highest classification Most Secret – and security was paramount.

All staff signed the Official Secrets Act (1939) and a 1942 security warning emphasised the importance of discretion even within Bletchley itself: "Do not talk at meals. Do not talk in the transport. Do not talk travelling. Do not talk in the billet. Do not talk by your own fireside. Be careful even in your Hut ..." Nevertheless, there were security leaks. Jock Colville , the Assistant Private Secretary to Winston Churchill , recorded in his diary on 31 July 1941, that the newspaper proprietor Lord Camrose had discovered Ultra and that security leaks "increase in number and seriousness". Without doubt, the most serious of these was that Bletchley Park had been infiltrated by John Cairncross , the notorious Soviet mole and member of the Cambridge Spy Ring , who leaked Ultra material to Moscow. Early work The first personnel of the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) moved to Bletchley Park on 15 August 1939.

The Naval, Military, and Air Sections were on the ground floor of the mansion, together with a telephone exchange, teleprinter room, kitchen, and dining room; the top floor was allocated to MI6 . Construction of the wooden huts began in late 1939, and Elmers School, a neighbouring boarding school, was acquired for the Commercial and Diplomatic Sections. After the United States joined the war a number of American cryptographers were posted to Hut 3 , and from May 1943 onwards there was close co-operation between British and American intelligence. (See 1943 BRUSA Agreement .) In contrast the Soviet Union was never officially told of Bletchley Park and its activities – a reflection of Churchill's distrust of the Soviets even during the US-UK-USSR alliance imposed by the Nazi threat. The only direct enemy damage to the site was done 20–21 November 1940 by three bombs probably intended for Bletchley railway station ; Hut 4, shifted two feet off its foundation, was winched back into place as work inside continued.

[13] Intelligence reporting Non-naval Enigma messages were deciphered in Hut 6 , followed by translation, indexing and cross-referencing, in Hut 3 . Only then was it sent out to the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), the intelligence chiefs in the relevant ministries, and later on to high-level commanders in the field. Naval Enigma deciphering was in Hut 8 , with translation in Hut 4 . Verbatim translations were sent only to the Naval Intelligence Division (NID) of the Admiralty's Operational Intelligence Centre (OIC), supplemented by information from indexes as to the meaning of technical terms and cross-references from a knowledge store of German naval technology. Hut 4 also decoded a manual system known as the dockyard cipher, which sometimes carried messages that were also sent on an Enigma network. Feeding these back to Hut 8 provided excellent "cribs" for Known-plaintext attacks on the daily naval Enigma key. Listening stations Initially, a wireless room was established at Bletchley Park. It was set up in the mansion's water tower under the code name "Station X", a term now sometimes applied to the codebreaking efforts at Bletchley as a whole.

The "X" is the Roman numeral "ten", this being the Secret Intelligence Service's tenth such station. Due to the long radio aerials stretching from the wireless room, the radio station was moved from Bletchley Park to nearby Whaddon Hall to avoid drawing attention to the site. Subsequently, other listening stations – the Y-stations , such as the ones at Chicksands in Bedfordshire, Beaumanor Hall , Leicestershire (where the headquarters of the War Office "Y" Group was located) and Beeston Hill Y Station in Norfolk – gathered raw signals for processing at Bletchley. Coded messages were taken down by hand and sent to Bletchley on paper by motorcycle despatch riders or (later) by teleprinter. Additional buildings The wartime needs required the building of additional accommodation. Huts Often a hut's number became so strongly associated with the work performed inside that even when the work was moved to another building it was still referred to by the original "Hut" designation.

[14] Hut 1: The first hut, built in 1939 [15] used to house the Wireless Station for a short time, later administrative functions such as transport, typing, and Bombe maintenance. The first Bombe, "Victory", was initially housed here. [16] Hut 2: A recreational hut for "beer, tea, and relaxation". Hut 3 : Intelligence: translation and analysis of Army and Air Force decrypts Hut 4 : Naval intelligence: analysis of Naval Enigma and Hagelin decrypts Hut 5: Military intelligence including Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese ciphers and German police codes. [17] Hut 6 : Cryptanalysis of Army and Air Force Enigma Hut 8 : Cryptanalysis of Naval Enigma. Hut 9: ISOS (Intelligence Section Oliver Strachey ). Hut 10: Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6) codes, Air and Meteorological sections. Hut 11: Bombe building. [18] Hut 14: Communications centre. [20] Hut 15: SIXTA (Signals Intelligence and Traffic Analysis).

Hut 16: ISK (Intelligence Service Knox ) Abwehr ciphers. Hut 18: ISOS (Intelligence Section Oliver Strachey). Hut 23: Primarily used to house the engineering department. After February 1943, Hut 3 was renamed Hut 23 Blocks In addition to the wooden huts there were a number of brick-built "blocks". Block A: Naval Intelligence. Block H: Tunny and Colossus (now The National Museum of Computing ). Work on specific countries' signals German signals Most German messages decrypted at Bletchley were produced by one or another version of the Enigma cipher machine, but an important minority were produced by the even more complicated twelve-rotor Lorenz SZ42 on-line teleprinter cipher machine . Five weeks before the outbreak of war, Warsaw's Cipher Bureau revealed its achievements in breaking Enigma to astonished French and British personnel. The British used the Poles' information and techniques, and the Enigma clone sent to them in August 1939, which greatly increased their (previously very limited) success in decrypting Enigma messages.

The bombe was an elec­tro­mech­anic­al device whose function was to discover some of the daily settings of the Enigma machines on the various German military networks . [22] Its pioneering design was developed by Alan Turing (with an important contribution from Gordon Welchman) and the machine was engineered by Harold 'Doc' Keen of the British Tabulating Machine Company . Each machine was about 7 feet (2.1 m) high and wide, 2 feet (0.61 m) deep and weighed about a ton. [23] At its peak, GC&CS was reading approximately 4,000 messages per day. [25] As a hedge against enemy attack [26] most bombes were dispersed to installations at Adstock and Wavendon (both later supplanted by installations at Stanmore and Eastcote ), and Gayhurst . [27] Luftwaffe messages were the first to be read in quantity. The German navy had much tighter procedures, and the capture of code books was needed before they could be broken.

When, in February 1942, the German navy introduced the four-rotor Enigma for communications with its Atlantic U-boats, this traffic became unreadable for a period of ten months. Britain produced modified bombes, but it was the success of the US Navy bombe that was the main source of reading messages from this version of Enigma for the rest of the war. Messages were sent to and fro across the Atlantic by enciphered teleprinter links. The Lorenz messages were codenamed Tunny at Bletchley Park. They were only sent in quantity from mid-1942. The Tunny networks were used for high-level messages between German High Command and field commanders. With the help of German operator errors, the cryptanalysts in the Testery (named after Ralph Tester , its head) worked out the logical structure of the machine despite not knowing its physical form. They devised automatic machinery to help with decryption, which culminated in Colossus , the world's first programmable digital electronic computer. This was designed and built by Tommy Flowers and his team at the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill .

The prototype first worked in December 1943, was delivered to Bletchley Park in January and first worked operationally on 5 February 1944. Enhancements were developed for the Mark 2 Colossus, the first of which was working at Bletchley Park on the morning of 1 June in time for D-day . Flowers then produced one Colossus a month for the rest of the war, making a total of ten with an eleventh part-built. The machines were operated mainly by Wrens in a section named the Newmanry after its head Max Newman . Bletchley's work was essential to defeating the U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic , and to the British naval victories in the Battle of Cape Matapan and the Battle of North Cape . In 1941, Ultra exerted a powerful effect on the North African desert campaign against German forces under General Erwin Rommel . General Sir Claude Auchinleck wrote that were it not for Ultra, "Rommel would have certainly got through to Cairo".

While not changing the events, " Ultra " decrypts featured prominently in the story of Operation SALAM , László Almásy 's daring mission across the Libyan Desert behind enemy lines in 1942. [28] Prior to the Normandy landings on D-Day in June 1944, the Allies knew the locations of all but two of Germany's fifty-eight Western-front divisions. Italian signals Italian signals had been of interest since Italy's attack on Abyssinia in 1935. During the Spanish Civil War the Italian Navy used the K model of the commercial Enigma without a plugboard; this was solved by Knox in 1937. When Italy entered the war in 1940 an improved version of the machine was used, though little traffic was sent by it and there were "wholesale changes" in Italian codes and cyphers. Knox was given a new section for work on Enigma variations, which he staffed with women ("Dilly's girls") who included Margaret Rock , Jean Perrin, Clare Harding, Rachel Ronald, Elisabeth Granger; and Mavis Lever .

Mavis Lever solved the signals revealing the Italian Navy's operational plans before the Battle of Cape Matapan in 1941, leading to a British victory. Although most Bletchley staff did not know the results of their work, Admiral Cunningham visited Bletchley in person a few weeks later to congratulate them. On entering World War II in June 1940, the Italians were using book codes for most of their military messages. The exception was the Italian Navy , which after the Battle of Cape Matapan started using the C-38 version of the Boris Hagelin rotor-based cipher machine , particularly to route their navy and merchant marine convoys to the conflict in North Africa. [30] As a consequence, JRM Butler recruited his former student Bernard Willson to join a team with two others in Hut 4. In June 1941, Willson became the first of the team to decode the Hagelin system, thus enabling military commanders to direct the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force to sink enemy ships carrying supplies from Europe to Rommel's Afrika Korps .

This led to increased shipping losses and, from reading the intercepted traffic, the team learnt that between May and September 1941 the stock of fuel for the Luftwaffe in North Africa reduced by 90%. After an intensive language course, in March 1944 Willson switched to Japanese language-based codes. [31] A Middle East Intelligence Centre (MEIC) was set up in Cairo in 1939. When Italy entered the war in June 1940, delays in forwarding intercepts to Bletchley via congested radio links resulted in cryptanalysts being sent to Cairo. A Combined Bureau Middle East (CBME) was set up in November, though the Middle East authorities made "increasingly bitter complaints" that GC&CS was giving too little priority to work on Italian cyphers. However, the principle of concentrating high-grade cryptanalysis at Bletchley was maintained. John Chadwick started cryptanalysis work in 1942 on Italian signals at the naval base 'HMS Nile' in Alexandria. Later he was with GC&CS; in the Heliopolis Museum, Cairo and then in the Villa Laurens, Alexandria.

Soviet signals Soviet signals had been studied since the 1920s. In 1939–40 John Tiltman (who had worked on Russian Army traffic from 1930) set up two Russian sections at Wavendon (a country house near Bletchley) and at Sarafand in Palestine. Two Russian high-grade army and navy systems were broken early in 1940. Tiltman spent two weeks in Finland, where he obtained Russian traffic from Finland and Estonia in exchange for radio equipment. In June 1941 when the Soviet Union became an ally, Churchill ordered a halt to intelligence operations against it. In December 1941 the Russian section was closed down, but in late summer 1943 or late 1944 a small GC&CS Russian cypher section was set up in London overlooking Park Lane then in Sloane Square. Japanese signals An outpost of the Government Code and Cypher School had been set up in Hong Kong in 1935, the Far East Combined Bureau (FECB).

The FECB naval staff moved in 1940 to Singapore, then Colombo , Ceylon , then Kilindini , Mombasa , Kenya. They succeeded in deciphering Japanese codes with a mixture of skill and good fortune. [32] The Army and Air Force staff went from Singapore to the Wireless Experimental Centre at Delhi , India. In early 1942, a six-month crash course in Japanese, for 20 undergraduates from Oxford and Cambridge, was started by the Inter-Services Special Intelligence School in Bedford, in a building across from the main Post Office. This course was repeated every six months until war's end. Most of those completing these courses worked on decoding Japanese naval messages in Hut 7 , under John Tiltman . By mid-1945 well over 100 personnel were involved with this operation, which co-operated closely with the FECB and the US Signal intelligence Service at Arlington Hall , Virginia. In 1999, Michael Smith wrote that: "Only now are the British codebreakers (like John Tiltman , Hugh Foss , and Eric Nave ) beginning to receive the recognition they deserve for breaking Japanese codes and cyphers".

Post war Continued secrecy After the War the secrecy imposed on Bletchley staff remained in force, so that most relatives never knew more than that a child, spouse, or parent had done some kind of secret war work. Churchill referred to the Bletchley staff as "the geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled". That said, occasional mentions of the work performed at Bletchley Park slipped the censor's net and appeared in print. With the publication of F. W. Winterbotham's The Ultra Secret (1974) [3] public discussion of Bletchley's work finally became possible (though even today some former staff still consider themselves bound to silence) [3] and in July 2009 the British government announced that Bletchley personnel would be recognised with a commemorative badge. [3] Site After the war, the site passed through a succession of hands [3] and saw a number of uses, including as a teacher-training college and local GPO headquarters. By 1991, the site was nearly empty and the buildings were at risk of demolition for redevelopment.

In February 1992, the Milton Keynes Borough Council declared most of the Park a conservation area, and the Bletchley Park Trust was formed to maintain the site as a museum. The site opened to visitors in 1993, and was formally inaugurated by HRH The Duke of Kent as Chief Patron in July 1994. In 1999 the land owners, the Property Advisors to the Civil Estate and BT , granted a lease the Trust giving the Trust control over most of the site. [3] Bletchley Park as a heritage attraction June 2014 saw the completion of an £8 million restoration project, which was marked by a visit from Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge . The Duchess' paternal grandmother, Valerie, and Valerie's twin sister, Mary (née Glassborow) both worked at Bletchley Park during the war. The twin sisters worked as Foreign Office Civilians in Hut 6 , where they managed the interception of enemy and neutral diplomatic signals for decryption. Valerie married Catherine's grandfather, Captain Peter Middleton . [3] [3] [3] Exhibitions Pigeon exhibition. The use of pigeons in WW2. Hut 11.

Life as a WRNS Bombe operator Hut 12. Bletchley Park: Rescued and Restored. Items found during the restoration work. Wartime garages Funding In October 2005, American billionaire Sidney Frank donated £500,000 to Bletchley Park Trust to fund a new Science Centre dedicated to Alan Turing . [3] In July 2008 a letter to The Times from more than a hundred academics condemned the neglect of the site. In September 2008, PGP , IBM , and other technology firms announced a fund-raising campaign to repair the facility. On 6 November 2008 it was announced that English Heritage would donate £300,000 to help maintain the buildings at Bletchley Park, and that they were in discussions regarding the donation of a further £600,000.

In October 2011, the Bletchley Park Trust received a £4.6m Heritage Lottery Fund grant to be used "to complete the restoration of the site, and to tell its story to the highest modern standards.", on the condition that £1.7m of 'match funding' is raised by the Bletchley Park Trust. Just weeks later Google contributed £550k and by June 2012 the trust had successfully raised £2.4m to unlock the grants to restore Huts 3 and 6, as well as develop its exhibition centre in Block C. Additional income is raised by renting Block H to the National Museum of Computing, and some office space in various parts of the park to private firms. [41] Other organisations sharing the campus National Museum of Computing The National Museum of Computing is housed in Block H, which is rented from the Bletchley Park Trust. Its Colossus and Tunny galleries tell an important part of allied breaking of German codes during World War II. There is a working reconstruction of a Colossus computer that was used on the high-level Lorenz cipher , codenamed Tunny by the British.

[42] The museum, which opened in 2007, is an independent voluntary organisation that is governed by its own board of trustees. Its aim is "To collect and restore computer systems particularly those developed in Britain and to enable people to explore that collection for inspiration, learning and enjoyment." [43] Through its many exhibits, the museum displays the story of computing through the mainframes of the 1960s and 1970s, and the rise of personal computing in the 1980s. It has a policy of having as many of the exhibits as possible in full working order. The Colossus and Tunny galleries are open daily. The rest of the Museum is open to the public every Thursday, Saturday and Sunday afternoons and most bank holidays, and by appointment for groups only, at other times. There are guided tours on Tuesday afternoons. There is a modest admission charge to the museum to help cover overheads. RSGB National Radio Centre The Radio Society of Great Britain 's National Radio Centre (including a library, radio station, museum and bookshop) are in a newly constructed building close to the main Bletchley Park entrance.

In popular culture Film The film The Imitation Game (2014), starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing , is set in Bletchley Park. Literature Bletchley featured heavily in Robert Harris ' ⋅novel Enigma (1995) and its eponymous 2001 film adaptation , although filming was done at nearby Chicheley Hall . (See photograph) A fictionalised version of Bletchley Park is featured in Neal Stephenson 's novel Cryptonomicon (1999). Bletchley Park plays a significant role in Connie Willis ' novel All Clear (2010). Television The 1979 ITV television serial Danger UXB featured the character Steven Mount, who was a codebreaker at Bletchley and was driven to a nervous breakdown (and eventual suicide) by the stressful and repetitive nature of the work. Ian McEwan 's television play The Imitation Game (1980) concludes at Bletchley Park. Bletchley Park was featured in the sixth and final episode of the BBC TV documentary The Secret War (1977), presented and narrated by William Woodard.

This episode featured interviews with Gordon Welchman, Harry Golombek , Peter Calvocoressi , F. W. Winterbotham , Max Newman, Jack Good, and Tommy Flowers. Theatre The play Breaking the Code (1986) is set at Bletchley. Video Games Bletchley is featured in a level of the Russian video game Death to Spies: Moment of Truth . The player, a Soviet spy working for SMERSH , is tasked with killing a professor at the park, and stealing a briefcase pertaining to Bletchley's code-breaking of Soviet communications. Code-breaker clatters back to life | UK news | The Guardian Code-breaker clatters back to life Share on Messenger Close It was a matchless winter day, sun blazing, not a cloud over Buckinghamshire. That was the problem: after 11 years, 100,000 volunteer hours, and 2,500 scavenged valves, sunspots defeated the efforts of a re-created 1944 computer to decode a message from the German cipher machine Lorenz.

The message was transmitted from Germany every hour from 9am, and at Bletchley Park, wartime headquarters of the British code-breakers, the receiver crackled - and recorded gibberish. Only a test paper clattered around to keep Colossus warm and ready for the real thing. "This is the very worst point in the 10-year sun cycle to have attempted this," said Tony Sale, computer boffin and former spy. "It happened often in the war, but that's no consolation. We'll get it tomorrow." Sale led the team which not only rebuilt the Mark 2 Colossus but saved the Edwardian mansion at Bletchley Park, in which a team of eccentric geniuses found answers which modern computing would take decades to match. The messages were transmitted from a computer museum near Hamburg which has one of the German machines whose 12 wheels encoded messages from the highest Nazi command. The more famous Enigma was used for less important messages. The Bletchley team did not know Lorenz existed, and unlike the captured Enigma, never saw one during the second world war.

After they deduced its existence, and built Colossus to crack it, it is estimated the war was shortened by up to three years. In all, 10 machines were built, and from the spring of 1944 they ran 24 hours a day. But all the machines were broken up by 1961. "We'd beaten the Germans, but there were still the Russians and the cold war was upon us. We told them about Enigma - but they never knew about Colossus," Sale said. In 1991, he launched a campaign to save Bletchley Park, now run as a museum by a trust, and then to rebuild Colossus, which survived as a few bits of rusty metal in a near-derelict building. The team which recreated it, working with the late Tommy Flowers, the engineer who built the first Colossus, was as eccentric as the original team. John Wetter, a retired BT engineer, says the thousands of hours he put into the project beat trailing around the supermarket after his wife. Andy Clark, director of the infant National Museum of Computing, is a professional forensic cryptographer.

Sale, after a career in the RAF, worked for MI5 with Peter Wright of Spycatcher fame, before becoming a computer consultant. Together they scavenged old parts which became redundant as BT went digital. The vital valves, replacing earlier electro-mechanical parts, are no longer made and came out of garages, attics and junkrooms. By yesterday evening Colossus still hadn't got a complete message. Transmissions start again this morning, and the message will also go up on the National Museum of Computing website ( tnmoc.co.uk ) to give home cryptographers a chance. The suspicion remains that Sale knows what it is. He denies it, and you'd probably have to kill him to get it. But if you got it and he survived, he'd have to kill you: he may look like a retired bank manager, but he was after all a spy. Backstory In 1938, Bletchley Park, an estate near Milton Keynes, was bought by Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair, head of MI6, and became a crucial arm of British military intelligence.

A team of civilians and service personnel - all describing themselves as "house guests" and "secretarial assistants" to the outside world and joined later by American code-breakers - gradually moved into the house. Their success breaking the German Enigma machine is most famous, but creating Colossus to break Lorenz was more significant. The existence of Lorenz was deduced in 1941 when a German signalman accidentally transmitted the same message twice. Heath Robinson, named for the cartoonist's eccentric machines, was the first attempt at a code-breaking computer, followed by Colossus Mark I, operational by January 1944. By the end of the war the 10 Mark 2 models had decrypted 63m characters of German messages. Bletchley Park Copyright © 2005 - 2017 Bletchley Park Trust. Telephone: +44 (0) 1908 640404

Question: At which Buckinghamshire estate did the National Museum of Computing open in 2007?
Answer: Bletchley Park